Thoreau's Legacy Read Online Free PDF Page B

Where in 1966 we had hopped crevasses and hiked closer to the Salamander, now visitors walked with a ranger. And in 2000, when I crossed over Gunsight Pass past Blackfoot Glacier, I saw that same kind of assault on the compressed ice of the glacier’s core.
    If I want to confirm that rising temperatures threaten the glaciers, I can look at the winter ice on Waitts Lake in Washington, where I have a cabin. The omens in the ice are grim. Waitts Lake freezes later and melts earlier, often turning into pools of mush rather than thick, jagged icebergs, as it used to in the 1970s. The warm water in the pools drizzles through the mass of ice and softens it. Forty years ago, as fishing season approached toward the end of April, we’d wonder if the ice would clear. We’d sled or skate our children across the lake in January with no qualms. In February we could still hear the ice whoop as it split to allow more freezing. But by the late ’80s the ice was usually gone in March, and by the ’90s sometimes sooner. Rarely can the ice bear the weight of walkers or snowmobiles as it used to. Also the lake temperatures have risen; swimming season lasts one month longer than it did in the ’70s.
    As the winters get shorter and the grasses green earlier, the deer multiply. The blackbirds chortle in the cattails sooner. We entertain more clouds of midges in May. Long V’s of Canada geese honk their way south even in December. Both wildlife and humans have changed their patterns.
    All life flows with the cycles of water. I fear my grandchildren will not be able to enjoy glaciers in Glacier Park or whooping ice at Waitts Lake. I watch warily as we approach the tipping point for saving glaciers, ice, and life on this blue planet.

    Carol Ellis has taught first grade in Spokane, Washington, for over twenty-five years. She raised her own three children to hike, swim, and skate at Waitts Lake.

Disappearing Coral
    Craig Quirolo
    In 1993 during a Reef Relief Photo Monitoring Survey dive, yellow-band disease was discovered and documented for the first time (top). Coral bleaching is often associated with rising ocean temperatures (middle). A five-hundred-year-old coral has died in a single decade (bottom). It would be a shame if the first generation of divers turned out to be the last to see living coral.

    Craig Quirolo, a photographer and artist who founded the environmental group Reef Relief in 1985.
He lives in Brooksville, Florida.

    Disappearing coral, Key West, Florida. Photos by Craig Quirolo.

Change Is in the Air
    Kristan Hutchison
    A FAMILIAR STENCH BLEW ACROSS THE ARCTIC TUNDRA. My three fellow hikers wrinkled their noses while I looked around with uneasy recognition.
    In our travels north of the Arctic Circle on a journalism fellowship to learn about research in Alaska, we had smelled little but dry lichen and the occasional plume of diesel and dust from trucks headed to oil fields at Prudhoe Bay. This new odor reeked of grass clippings and coffee grounds rotting in a swamp. I scanned the ground and horizon for its source, expecting to find moist piles of manure and a few heifers chewing their cud.
    This was a smell I remembered from my childhood thirty years ago and 2,780 kilometers south, in the cow pastures of our family farm near Seattle. The moist odor carried memories of idyllic summer afternoons, splashing in a creek as cow pies oozed into the mud and crusted in the sun. But here on Alaska’s North Slope there were no cows, no alders leaning over lazy streams, no snakes to catch in the grass.
    Except for the Brooks Range to the south, the tundra was so flat and empty I could see the curve of the earth as it stretched toward the Arctic Ocean. Caribou and musk ox grazed these lands rather than cattle, but I saw no sign of them. Here the smell of manure was as disconcerting as if one of the bearded scientists had suddenly spoken to me in my mother’s voice.
    Seeing where the smell originated intensified my unease. As we walked,